We come now to the conclusion of this second part, and to the question that gives it its full significance: what are the new circumstances of the 21st century, and why do they make freedom not merely possible but imperative?

The first and most decisive fact is that work has become increasingly intellectual. This creates an entirely new situation, because the development of thought does not happen by miracle; it happens through free debate, through the competition of ideas, and therefore through religious tolerance, freedom of expression, and free education. In societies where production required nothing but brute force, educational freedom had no particular importance; one simply had to learn to hunt or to break stone. The intellectual patrimony of humanity was far smaller, and education occupied a correspondingly reduced domain.

The great defect of authoritarian systems of education and thought is that they always conceive of ideas and truth as fixed, as things merely to be transmitted. But the truth is not fixed; knowledge is created, it improves, and the purpose of education, like the purpose of all freedom of expression, of science, of research, and even of religious tolerance (for there is a necessary progress of religious ideas as well, a subject on which many French liberals, Benjamin Constant among them, labored extensively) is to enable this creation and improvement.

Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, in his Essai sur la répartition des richesses, was one of the French liberal authors who most thoroughly analyzed these new circumstances and their future implications. He showed that the increasingly intellectual character of work enriches new layers of society, and in particular transforms the situation of women. As work becomes more intellectual, women's value and productive contribution rise dramatically. One can no longer confine them to the household and the family without cutting society off from the intelligence of half of humanity, intelligence that is needed for innovation, for technical and technological improvements, and for the general advancement of production.

Work has also become far more productive, and this introduces a cascade of new circumstances. Greater productivity generates new resources that can be employed, first, for savings and individual self-sufficiency. The individual becomes increasingly capable of sustaining himself and of activating his individual liberty by assuming the responsibilities that come with it, rather than relying on the security of servitude. These new resources can also finance security on a collective level: a police force, a justice system, far more effective and far less costly, proportionally, than anything available in the past.

Resources become available to mitigate hazards: diseases, natural disasters, and the countless uncertainties that once dominated human existence. In the most ancient societies, communities were entirely at the mercy of these hazards; today, we can anticipate them, protect against them, and dedicate resources to their management.

Perhaps most significantly, new resources become available to care for the weak and the vulnerable: children, the elderly, the severely disabled. In the earliest societies, these individuals were systematically sacrificed, not out of cruelty but out of economic necessity. The elderly could not be sustained when they could no longer contribute to production. Newborns were tested for physical fitness; those deemed weak were killed. In some societies, the firstborn child was routinely sacrificed, on the reasoning that, like the first fruits of a tree, the earliest offspring were not as sound as those that followed. Women were maintained in minimal numbers, because they cost resources to sustain and their productive contribution, in an economy based on brute force, was considered negligible. These practices, which we examine today with a mixture of horror and curiosity, attributing them to religious ideas or superstition, were in fact economic necessities imposed by the extreme precariousness of existence.

The new circumstances also include globalization, the opening of markets that permits the harmony of interests. In the modern world, we are increasingly in relationships between producers and consumers, between suppliers and clients, rather than in the opposition of interests that characterized ancient societies. When production depends on seizure rather than creation, when two groups compete for the same hunting ground, they are locked in a zero-sum conflict. But peaceful competition, made possible by ever-widening markets, creates mutual benefit.

International competition also makes the effects of harmful regulations, heavy taxes, and excessive public debt far more visible and consequential. In the closed societies of the past, political domination could be total, because there was no alternative; there was no external market against which to measure one's performance. Today, the nations that are most liberal draw the greatest profit from commerce, precisely because they are in competition with nations that are indebted, interventionist, burdened by oppressive regulations and heavy taxation, and consequently less productive. The consequences of unfreedom are no longer hidden; they are exposed by the relentless comparison of international trade.

Finally, the history of technology, which reaches back to the earliest ages but has accelerated stupendously in the last two centuries, provides perhaps the most striking of the new circumstances. Technology has enabled advances in freedom and consolidated gains that would otherwise be fragile.

Consider the retreat of the control of thought. The French liberals of the 19th century, even during the era of Napoleon III, struggled to write letters to one another freely. The press was controlled; correspondence was surveilled. Publishing a book required navigating censorship and regulation; an imprimeur could not risk publishing works that might be banned, just as under the Ancien Régime, when a royal authorization was needed to print any volume. Today, technology has dramatically reduced the ability of governments to control the transmission of ideas. The creation and dissemination of new ideas is immeasurably easier than it was even two centuries ago.

We see this also in the protection of private life, and in the development of digital currencies, which permit exchanges far less constrained than those of the past. These are elements upon which I would like to conclude this examination of new circumstances. The past is far more deeply embedded in conditions of non-liberty than we tend to realize, and today we see new elements of technology, of productive and above all intellectual work, a revolution of immense importance, that make freedom more practicable than ever before.

We can return to the fundamental facts of human nature that we established in the first part: self-ownership, individual liberty, individual autonomy. These facts have not changed; but the circumstances that permit their exercise have changed profoundly across history. This was the entire purpose of the second part of our course. We now turn to the effects of freedom and the effects of constraint, which we will compare, before examining the sophisms that sustain political domination even in our own day, and finally outlining a program of liberty, economic, social, political, and international, as it is possible today after these historical transformations.